Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday September 19, 2007 @07:18PM
from the new-version dept.

Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."

"For GNOME 2.20, the control panels have been reorganized slightly to reduce the number of control panels, making it easier to find what you need."

From the release notes page for 2.20. On can only assume this means they've gutted the whole thing and you now have the option to choose between 2 lovely colorschemes, everything else has been set at the factory.

From the version currently in Gutsy, they basically threw all the appearance-related apps into one mega-app. I haven't noticed any missing functionality (in fact, the fonts and toolbar applets are unchanged), though I would appreciate if Ubuntu came up with a more useful "simple" Compiz app (it's currently "off", "on", "insane")

As with many things gnome-related, the configuration utility is not installed by default so as not to confuse users. Advanced users who care to adjust the eye-candy will presumably know how to get the software, i.e. apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager . In this case, I think it's a wise move, since this utility is as insanely fine-grained as the old beryl configutation manager, except it has about 10 new plugins. OCD people could spend hours tweaking the window spring model alone.

To be perfectly honest, I sort of like it when configuration options are sort of organically integrated into the application instead of displayed in a long list in some preference panel.

And then again, there are many cases in which it's perfectly acceptable to leave them out altogether.

Simplicity is a beautiful thing. One of the core fundamentals of Unix is that an application does a single job, does it well, and provides output such that it can easily be piped into another application. Gnome and KDE have routinely shat upon this paradigm, and it's only been recently that we're finally starting to return to it.

I've used Xfce quite a bit as well, and despite the lack of advanced configuration options, I must say that everything more or less works the way I expect it to, and it's all rather intuitive. The fact that it's ridiculously snappy is a very nice bonus (remember how "snappy" Windows 95 or Mac OS Classic were? Xfce is sort of like that, but with a real operating system underneath, and a full complement of modern features). The configuration options were sparse, and in one or two cases there were things I'd change, but as far as the whole package goes, I'm a big big fan.

If I want to do something tricky, I'll go to the command line. GUIs simply aren't elegant for every function imaginable, and it's sort of assumed that you know at least a few basic unix commands if you're going to be using something as obscure as Xfce. Besides... how many normal users have to pipe their routing table into grep on a daily basis?

KDE's a prime example of feature bloat. From a technical standpoint, it's probably the better of the top two desktops, but from a usability standpoint, I find it horribly unintuitive. Lots of toolbars full of tiny similar-looking blue icons don't help either. If Microsoft did Unix, it'd look something like KDE.

I think that you're looking back with Pentium-III colored glasses. On a shiny new Pentium I machine of the day, Win95 performance was acceptable but not great. On a typical installed-base 16MB 486/33 machine, Windows 95 was a pig.

The situation was probably comparable to KDE and Vista's performance today on common machines. Unfortunately for these new desktop environments, however, the widening lag of memory and disk bandwidth behind CPU speed means that they probably won't feel "snappy" in the foreseeable future just from hardware improvements.

The problem with xfce or gnome is not the choice they made per se, but the fact that you can't actually get out of them. If you happen to be a person that don't fit what they see as a regular user and what is good for you, you just can't have a good experience with their desktop.So yes, the KDE control center is crammed with features, but I only know and use those that I need and I have turned the desktop into a wonderfull, simple and sane experience for me. A thing that I can't do with GNOME, XFCE or any Windows.And before you actually dismisses me as a KDE fanboy: I was a GNOME user prior to their stance on "forced down your throat" usability. I had also all "regular users" I knows of try the GNOME desktop so that I don't force my choice on them and they all prefer KDE. So this is not a representative panel, it's just a familym but they are supposedly the target of this usability choice, but either because its defaults are windows like (wife used windows at work before they switched to Linux), either because they can turn it into a strange unbearable carnival of colors (youngsters), either because they can drag and drop all their heart between applications (grand parents) or because I can heavily customise it to suit my day to day work, everybody chose to use KDE.I'm sorry, but when I use the console it doesnt force me to use that command to another because it's "THE right way to do it", I can choose whichever I see fit for the job and pipe them into an unthought of combination.That's the part I like about the unix philosophy.To me the GNOME usability choice were not made to suit the users, but to suit the helpdesks. Users are versatile, I dislike and I'm even worried by this computer behavior which asks the user to fits the system and not the other way around.

"So yes, the KDE control center is crammed with features, but I only know and use those that I need and I have turned the desktop into a wonderful, simple and sane experience for me. A thing that I can't do with GNOME, XFCE or any Windows."

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default. They do this not by removing random features just to spite people, but by conducting usability studies to find out what actually works and doesn't work for people then doing the former by default and fixing the latter.

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place. Now, this could be because you prefer to have double-clicking on a window's title bar start a ytalk session using a regex over the window's text, or because you prefer to rebind the enter key to double-backspace-n, which is fine - go for your life. But if that's the case you're an outlier (no offence - rejoice in your point of difference!) and you probably shouldn't be making broad judgements about the usability of desktop environments for anyone other than yourself.

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.

No, the default is easy to use: most Windows users can log into the guest account on my PC and use it straight away.

However, I also have the flexibility to customise it to be productive for me.

KDE is also more functional than Gnome. Genuinely useful panel applets, preview, tabbing and split window functionality in Konqueror, etc. are actually very useful.

I like the elegance of Gnome, so I have tried it several times. I find it less functional, and a lot of functionality works less well (compare opening a directory over sftp in Konqueror and Nautilus, for example).

The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.

By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box. Every "power user" has their own little bunch of tweaks that help them work better - for instance, I find windows unusable without X-mouse from TweakUI. This doesn't mean that windows is shit - I'm perfectly happy to accept I'm not a default user.

The OP's point was that, with DE's like KDE, actually give you the OPTION to change the default behaviour in a reasonably simple manner. Yes, there's alot of buttons to press, and 99% of users will never need to bother setting up a special rule that opens all Konsole windows on virtual desktop 4, xinerama screen 2 - but for the users who DO desire that functionality it's an absolute godsend. Last time I set up a GNOME desktop for myself I couldn't find a way of doing this, but when you know what you want KDE makes it pretty simple.

What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.

"By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box."

Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.

While some kinds of preferences make total sense, some do not and too many are generally a bad thing. To paraphrase a wise hacker [ometer.com], those extra preferences are just way for lazy developers to avoid making hard decisions.

And it looks to me that you are missing his point too. Currently Gnome is mainly used by Geeks (ie advanced users). They like to keep control of their installation, that is what Linux is all about until today.

But the Gnome "market department" wants to go mainstream (excellent long term target). And thus they need to "make things simple".There is a clash between their current clients and the target they've got in mind. They can't satisfy both with an unique interface IMHO. Read Geeks posting on slashdot. A lot have stated that they have migrated from Gnome to KDE. It became even "trendy" since the Linus comment.

I guess they should deal with two profiles: simple and advanced. You hide/simplify features in the UI for simple users and keep them for the advanced profiles.

for the former users, too many options are a bad thing. for the latter, there is no such thing as too many options. it would be a tremendous step in the right direction (and trivially easy to implement) if there was simply an option to turn on/off "advanced mode" in gnome/kde/any other wm/de.

There is an equivalent to advanced mode for GNOME. It's called GConf and it allows access to all sorts of bells and whistles that aren't visible in the main Control Center. All sorts of tricks are hidden in there, from lists of screensavers for GNOME screensaver to run to custom keybindings running scripts. The only extra I use for advanced window management is Devil's Pie [burtonini.com] which matches windows and performs window modifications based on a LISP configuration file. If that isn't hard core enough for you, yo

And that's of course where you're missing the point. GNOME, XFCE and MacOSX attempt to be usable by default.

And that is why Gnome, XFCE and especially Apple (hatesit!hatesit!hatesit!) completely fail to make a decent GUI. There is no default user. It might come as a surprise, but people are not the same. What's fine and intuitive for me is a hell for someone else. Really. Users should be able adjust the GUI to their wishes, not the other way around. Defaults are for people who don't care enough to change it. Which is a reasonable choice by the way, and should be supported by the system. KDE is the only GUI i ever used that gave me the possibilities to adjust it's behaviour exactly to fit my intuition. The holy grail of THE perfect GUI that fits THE intuition of THE user is a fiction. It seems only KDE understands this.

Strangely they've added a few. The new "Appearance" applet is quite
nice.

But "fortunately" screensavers remain unconfigurable [wordpress.com].
After all, Billy Jon McCann (the sole developer and rule of the
Guuh-Nome screensaver universe) says that screensavers that you can
adjust settings on are "inherently
broken [gnome.org]".

Gnome 2.20 has better power management? I never thought that was the job of the desktop environment. I thought it was just to supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity, and the like but wouldn't think the the desktop environment just dealt with power management itself.
Can someone clue me into how this works?

All previous GNOME releases had a problem where the volume control would wake up every 100ms to poll the mixer settings, which prevented the CPU from entering and maintaining deep sleep states. The new volume control does not do that, which may be good for a few watts at the outlet. Other applications have undergone a similar treatment.

As I understand it, GNOME Power Manger runs a DBUS service. This can be used by clients to inhibit sleep. This is very useful; it means when you're watching a movie in Totem the screensaver won't cut it in, and nor will your monitor turn off, merely because you haven't touched the mouse during the last 5 minutes of intensive movie watching. So I'd say there are good reasons for your desktop environment controlling power management.

So Gnome lets the user manage how the power related features work? Sounds like power management to me.

I know what you mean and I know the statement could be said to mean either, but if we are talking about a DE I would always assume that we are talking about a power management *interface* rather than anything that is taking direct control of the hardware.

I hope these improvements mean Tomboy has been taken out. Right, please?

Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand. It's the only part of Gnome proper which uses mono -- so why do they bother shipping it?

Of course, asking whether major annoyances like new windows opening on whatever workspace you're currently on instead of the one they were started have been fixed is kind of pointless...

I think you answered your own question. They insist on shipping Tomboy so they can have a reason to ship mono. Without Tomboy, and without Beagle, the search tool thousands of times more idiotic than Tracker, there would be no reason for anybody to install mono.

Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."

Seriously? That is good news - I had assumed the two were integrated like.. IE in Windows XP..I really did not want to get tangled up in Mono, so I have been avoiding Gnome (chosing KUbuntu over Ubuntu) to specifically avoid Mono.

Why no Mono? I don't need no stinkin middleware, I just want a clean gui on top of linux.I also don't want to rely on anything that Microsoft can decide to destroy with IP lawsuits one day..(yes, they would. Mono is a trap).

Dude, it's a note taking app, and Gnome isn't MS. There is no way Tomboy would ever be integrated like IE in Windows.You can even run a completely mixed environment. For example you could theoretically run GDM (the Gnome session/logon manager) with Nautilus (Gnome) to handle the Desktop, use the Fluxbox window manager (not Gnome or KDE), have Kicker running (KDE Panel/Menu bar) and use Konqueror (KDE) for the file manager. Or just about any other weird combo you could think of.

I wanted to have a smart-ass reply on your message about you not being obligated to have it in your panel and that other software also depends on mono.Then I though; you are partly right; why use mono for a note-taking application?

It's for many users much like notepad on java.

In your case I would look for an alternative note-taking-thingy for GTK if you need one.

The same for me; I don't use beagle because I don't like it archiving my personal files (and popping them up for arbitrary searches by others) on s

Including a minor tool for a trivial task which takes as much memory as the rest of core Gnome together is something I can't really understand

That's bullshit. Every gnome applet or application on my machine has an RSS between 5 Mbytes and 15 Mbytes, and there are dozens of them. Tomboy has an RSS size of 26 Mbytes, which is more, but not a lot more.

But unlike all those other applets and tools, you would only need a single Mono VM to run all applets and most applications safely together. If it were fully

Because they realize that Gnome can't survive as a desktop that's being hacked in C/C++.

I really don't know whether the Mono VM is the future for the Gnome desktop. But I do know this much: C, C++, and Python are not the future of desktops.

I was with you until the bold part (my emphasis). Yes, modern desktops (and all complex modern software) should probably be written in modern high-level languages. But why not Python? Python is exactly a good example of a modern language, I would think...

Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors. The fact that it has done this says a lot about Open Source as a superior way to develop non-proprietary software. When GNOME became common in the Unix world, it mostly displaced CDE [opengroup.org], a non-proprietary desktop that was developed the old-fashioned way: a bunch of companies got together and formed a committee that wrote a spec, that various people went out and implemented.

GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.

There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.

SGI is still around, but they no longer sell systems that run Unix. Their flavor of Unix was IRIX, which only ever ran on MIPS, and that CPU is no longer cost-competitive for big iron. So SGI sells Itanium and x64 systems running Linux. FWIW, their default desktop is GNOME.

Dell is also a Unix vendor of sorts, since they sell a fair number of servers running Solaris. Guess what the default desktop for Solaris is?

It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But they're not part of the Unix marketplace. Almost nobody buys them to run Unix software, by which I mean software that's coded against traditional Unix APIs. Almost all Mac software is coded against Apple's proprietary APIs, and isn't available on "other" Unixes. The fact that Apple found it convenient to code those APIs on top of Unix APIs is an implementation detail that matters not at all to 99% of Apple's customers.

"It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But blah blah blah."

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is now an Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product, conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Come October Mac OS X is UNIX®, and it will have a larger market share then Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX combined.

Gnome was also a child of politics, if not bureaucracy, it grew out of the politics that initially surrounded the KDE project, when Qt was licensed in a way that was deemed to not be "Free Software". Gnomewas one of several ways in which the GNU foundation attempted to rectify the problem (the other was an attempt to write a GPL'd library compatable with the Qt api so that KDE did not need to depend on it. When Qt went GPL, the issue went away and the project became redundant and died)

I'm talking about how GNOME was created, you're talking about why. It may well be that the decision to start the GNOME project was political, but that doesn't mean the design process was political, as it usually is when a product is designed by a committee. Perhaps my choice of phrase ("child of politics") was poorly chosen, but I think it's pretty clear what I was talking about.

CDE (Common Desktop Environment) has never been open source. It is available for Linux from Xi Graphics [xig.com], but you'll pay for it and in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth due to the fact that you need to use their "Accelerated X Server" to run it instead of your standard X.org installation.

There is a petition [marutan.net] to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studie

I've been using Gnome since 0.3 or 0.30 (or something like that), and just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work! It's the best desktop environment I've ever used (I use Windows and OSX regularly, but find Gnome to be the most efficient/least cumbersome). I've had no trouble with customization, but then again I find gconf-editor to be remarkably easy and intuitive to use for all the advanced options I want to configure (such as a ridiculous quantity of keyboard shortcuts). The latter half of the 2.x releases have completely eliminated my chief complaints, i.e., performance, menu editing, and file manager issues. Can't wait to try the next release when Ubuntu 7.10 comes out.

Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.

It was lightweight on memory and speedy. Every release since then has been slower. 12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.

There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them.

Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.Whats really sad is that Presentation Manager was OOP/Class aware which is what both KDE and Gnome are still striving for.

Congrats to the Gnome team. Hardware companies everywhere salute you.

If I bitch about system requirements for Windows, then I can bitch about system requirements for Gnome/KDE.I won't be downloading Gnome. XFce4 is everything Gnome was suppose to be. How many Gnome programmers use XUbuntu for development?

Actually, I found 2.18 to be _much_ faster than 2.16. To quote a friend of mine, "gnome-terminals are popping up like popcorn:D"

12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.

/me fires up htop
Hmmm, its using 2mb on my computer...

Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.

2mbs in 1995! Computers back then had 16mb of RAM remember?
Right now, on my computer, Firefox is at the top of the memory list with 125mbs, followed by thunderbird at 25. Neither of them are gnome apps. The core gnome component using the most amount of memory right now is nautilus (which does half the work in gnome

Interesting. I've been looged in to 2.20 all day, and my top processes right now are:

Epiphany (8 tabs) 80MB

Deskbar 24MB

Nautilus 16MB

Rhythmbox (playing) 15MB

Tomboy (50+ notes) 14MB

Ekiga 10MB

My panels are stuffed to the gills, I've been running all day, and I'm still only using 309MB of memory. I'd call that really good for requirements on modern hardware. We can talk later about what happens when I open OO.o, but that's not a Gnome app.;)

Gnome, though it is my favorite desktop for linux, has always been very buggy. This release is no different. What the developers don't realize is that once they commit to fixing bugs we the end user will see those bug fixes as new features. Someone there needs to be bonked on the head so they can understand that fixing bugs can be seen as new features by users.

Users don't want buggy software even if it appears that new features have been added.

There are some real show stoppers in gnome. Interesting that for release after release they haven't fixed them. One of them clearly can be demonstrated by copying large numbers of files on a network. You'll be regularly prompted for generic errors about the copy process. You can retry and the file MAY be copied. Moving files over a network is not a safe endeavor. Yeah yeah, small groups of files are ok, but large groups can result in you thinking the process has completed when it really didn't complete the process.

I guess you should also steer away from every mainstream Linux OS since they're all including mono these days. In fact, you should start wearing your tinfoil hat as well too, because the aliens have patents on Mono technology as well!

Yes, the patent issue with respect to mono is nonsense. MS (or any other legally-wise company) is going to make their patents as broad as possible and not tie them to a specific implementation. Thus non-mono code is just as likely to trip over MS patents.An absurd alternate-universe example: if email were patented by MS and implemented only in.NET, than using that feature in your mono program might get you in trouble. On the other hand, if you decided to create a non-mono version of email for Linux, you'd

IMHO, it surpassed it with 2.14. At least that's when I switched from KDE (after using it since '99 and was very anti-Gnome). At this point I don't want to go back to KDE. Gnome makes so much more sense as everything is organized more logically, the button/control overload is gone, the dialogs are great (ie, the file dialog, I love having my network and usb drives listed by name on the side instead of having to click on media or browse down to/media). That and Clearlooks is beautiful and looks so much

Wow. I get moded troll for an opinion that's commonly displayed in the Ubuntu forums. It's well known KDE crashes far more than GNOME, people have expressed this as such. What fucked up community are you a part of who can't take a little criticism?

Wow. I get moded troll for an opinion that's commonly displayed in the Ubuntu forums. It's well known KDE crashes far more than GNOME, people have expressed this as such. What fucked up community are you a part of who can't take a little criticism?

I may be biased since I've been using KDE for years and have never known it to crash, but I have to ask - what proportion of Ubuntu users would you trust to correctly differentiate between a KDE crash, an X Server crash or a kernel panic/Oops? Also, if you're putt

I'm a hardcore Gnome user (it's prettier, more "solid", and I like how simple they make configuration, even though I've been a programmer, sysadmin, have used Linux exclusively for about 5 years and am by all accounts a "power-user") but man it bugs me that they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore. If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Or

"...they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore."

It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).

"If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!"

Glade isn't necessary anymore; GtkBuilder replaces Glade from a programmer's POV, Glade the UI designer tool just outputs an XML file that you can read in your App and generate a perfectly functional UI, which to me is just plain elegance. No more having to programatically design and update UIs. Pango is not a code generator either, it's a Font Layout system that supports complex font layouts. Orbit is a deprecated piece of hold-over bullshit the GNOME people haven't gotten around to officially deprecate yet, and shouldn't be used with new code (use D-Bus instead).

"I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing..."

Which is exactly why the OSS community is C++-phobic. Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations. GLib was invented and written in C to give the OSS community a truly standard library that they could control across platforms, and because GLib is written in C, most follow suit and write their applications in C. Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.

See, that's why I put the parenthetical in there, I am a programmer, but I'd prefer 2 features that both work right to 1,000 that half work. To me, the latter is morally equivalent to lying. Although Gnome absolutely has its share of problems, it's well ahead of KDE as far as actually working. I keep an updated KDE installed on my desktop and check it out at least every 6 months--mostly because Gnome isn't good enough either, but it's the best I can find. The thing is, I jump into KDE, and within a half hour I've found four things that don't work, cause crashes, silently fail, or just suck (by just suck I mean unresponsiveness, the crappy menu transparency and shadows that are off by a couple pixels that's completely different from the crappy window transparency, which isn't even consistent in itself!).

As for the list of junk I rattled off for Gnome, yeah, you got me, that's just what I remember from when I was going to help out with the project a few years ago. After realizing that I'd have to learn 40 different, sometimes incompatible, often redundant frameworks, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere. And yeah, I do have something that will be coming out Real Soon Now (had to take a break from programming due to tendinitis in the wrist that's still bothering me to this day) but the point is, Gnome looks like it does not because all that crap actually helps out, but because 50 different people had a Great Idea.

No, wait, there is no point. Oh! Here's one: A project as big as a desktop environment that needs to be extremely consistent throughout, needs a Linus. It needs one guy to be the benevolent dictator, because right now it looks like anyone can get any old thing in there. Tomboy a C# app? wtf? It's not complicated, it's an applet, a couple borderless windows, and a simple WebDAV client, all of which I'd bet lots of money Gnome already has libraries for. It could be just as easily implemented in C, and a halfway experienced Gnome developer could implement it, with all of its current features, in probably a week or less. I'm halfway tempted to take a week of vacation and do it myself just to prove a point.

Like how? Look at how much code reuse goes on in KDE vs Gnome. Every KDE app has the same spellchecking engine, every KDE app has the same text editor component, the same menu structure, the same shortcut configuration, the same widgets, dcop, etc, etc. Kontact, the KDE equivalent to Evolution, is just a small shell around all the individual components. KDE4 extends this even further, by making more powerful components available to developers. In a Gnome changelog, on the other hand, you see changes like "gedit gets editable toolbars" or "somegnomeapp gets gnomevfs support". You will never find something like that in a KDE changelog, because all the apps get all those features for free with the framework. I find it absolutely mindboggling that Gedit would have to manually add support for editable toolbars on gnomevfs, and then even find it worth mentioning in the release notes. It really shows that the libraries are not nearly as simple to use, or there is some kind of impediment to using them.

This kind of thing is evident when you look at resource usage between the desktops too. Why is it that KDE and Gnome use similar ammounts of memory when Gnome has so many less features (I'm not saying more features are better, but you can't deny that KDE has more features than Gnome). I'd be happy with a simple desktop like Gnome (it is much prettier after all) if it also was lighter on resources, but it isn't.

They have to use the libraries, otherwise there is no integration either.

Well sure, you have to use some libraries either way, but in kde, when you open the standard "Open file" dialog, you get kioslave (network transparent file access) "for free". The file dialog supports it, and there is no extra work involved on the part of the application developer. Same with the toolbar, no KDE application developer would ever have to conciously think about whether they want to add support for editable toolbars, beca

mplayer may have legal problems... that said you my want to try "gnome-mplayer" it can be found at getdeb. It is a gnomish wrapper for mplayer (just the basics). Also, you may want to try gecko-mediaplayer. It is a plugin for firefox that controls gnome-mplayer via dbus to playback embedded videos at most websites.

"Worry as much about his favourite DE as much as you worry about his favourite wine."

Everyone knows Linus' favourite wine [winehq.com] is no wine at all! Linus has incredible taste. He also has a pretty big clue stick, and will hit you with it if you let him. If you had said it is safe to ignore his taste in art, then I could agree, but you ignore Linus' advice on all matters technical at great peril. I know this is true, because he almost invariably comes to the same conclusions I have come to independantly:-)

If you use Gnome, you'd do well to try Epiphany. Firefox doesn't follow any of the Gnome conventions: it looks completely out of place in a Gnome desktop. The GUI for Epiphany is much more responsive and I get to tag my bookmarks. There's also the little gem of writing your own quick searches as easily as adding a bookmark. You like Firefox. Go ahead. Gnome users who try to stick with Gnome apps for a consistent look and feel should be on Epiphany, though.